Experts need 10,000 hours to perfect a skill. We inherit talent but acquire mastery.
Conflict requires its own training. Some professionals spend years developing the art of rhetoric and debate.
Doctors spend years learning to avoid conflict. They work to help and serve, not to pick fights. Doctors see people at their weakest; prostrated patients looking for relief, not conquest.
Medical schools choose students bent on service. Schools stopped accepting students with nothing more than a great transcript 30 years ago. Modern interviews try to identify the most gentle and selfless. Patients love altruistic servants. But self sacrifice leaves the medical profession weak and defenceless.
Doctors have little clue about real self protection. Schools pound the fighting spirit out of students. By genetics and training, doctors prefer compromise over victory.
Doctors Trained to Surrender
David Esser MD asked whether we select doctors, and train them, to sacrifice and give in? He said:
How we select and train physicians puts them at a disadvantage when dealing with Government.
It’s difficult to get into medical school.
Only a select few are admitted.
Those that get in are dedicated and hard working, ready to sacrifice time and income to train and learn. Docs spend many years training; always being available; getting a small income.
At work, we are trained to keep our wits about us and work through a crisis without getting worked up; patience and persistence.
What we have learned and practice daily acts as a major barrier to physician action.
Calm and Reasonable
Calm people can be scary. They often look placid right before they fly into a rage. Pacifists never learn to wrestle. By middle age, they have only two faces, calm and crazy.
Most doctors hate fighting. If government handles them well, doctors lose every battle just to avoid the fight. Physicians have never practiced engaging worthy opponents.
Government should still tread softly. Everyone has a breaking point.
Despite an almost complete lack of fighting spirit, some doctors insist that they would fight for something they believe in.
How about:
- Multiple cuts to medical funding for vulnerable patients?
- Or unilateral actions that target new graduates?
Maybe all medical schools should include 10,000 hours of training on how to fight government to prepare doctors for practice in Canada? If doctors cannot fight, we need to find someone who will do it for us.
